The urban project as a holistic approach to the recovery of degraded areas of public housing

The present paper describes a design method helpful to the development of degraded areas. The method assumes that the low quality of a degraded urban area is often connected to an oversimplification of the structure and the functions associated with a complex organism which is the contemporary city. Hence the application of an analytical process that identifies the degree of diversification of the services required in a specific urban area, and the degree of differentiation of residential supply. From the appropriate mediation of these aspects comes the economic feasibility of project interventions, often particularly onerous, in which the interest of large private investors can be moved. The case study focuses on a popular and peripheral neighbourhood of the city of Bari. The pursuit of an increase of social welfare in the heavily degraded urban areas such as this, requires, necessarily, huge financial resources and transformations that cannot be absorbed by forms of public financing. On the other hand, in this neighbourhood, the policy of small changes developed in almost half a century, often only sociological or of urban mitigation, has not been able to generate any effect of social mitigation. In this sense, the urban project becomes a tool from which to reformulate the residential quotients and urban services and to avoid forms of social and settlement marginalization.